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Downloaded from Manchesterhive.Com at 09/26/2021 07:39:35PM Via Free Access 140 World/Globe 6 Australia to Paraguay: race, class, and poetry in a South American colony Jason Rudy, Aaron Bartlett, Lindsey O’Neil, and Justin Thompson In 1893, Queenslander William Lane embarked with 234 white Australian immigrants for Paraguay, where they were to establish a utopian socialist community. Hundreds more Australians would follow, drawn to what was promised as a worker’s paradise in South America. According to the New Australia, a newspaper published in New South Wales prior to the emigrants’ departure, in Paraguay ‘the means of working, including land and capital, should belong to the workers, who, by co-operative working, could then produce to supply all their wants, and need not produce for the profit of anybody else’.1 Lane was a notorious racist, and his motivation for the Para- guayan colony was in part a response to the influx of Asian immigrants to Australia in the later decades of the nineteenth century. Our interest in Colo- nia Cosme, the town eventually established and maintained in the Para- guayan jungle, centres around its newspaper, the Cosme Monthly, and its accounting of minstrel performances there. We read Cosme’s poetry and song, and its engagement with the form of minstrelsy, as part of a larger effort by Lane and his fellow émigrés to situate the colony in relation to Aus- tralia, the United States, and Great Britain, specifically in racialised terms. Our chapter begins with an overview of Australia’s late-century labour crisis, which precipitated Lane’s migration scheme. We turn then to the Cosme Monthly and its complex negotiations of race and class via poetry and song. Australian labour and the vision of Paraguay William Lane was an English-born immigrant to Australia, arriving in Bris- bane in 1885. Among the few possessions he brought with him to the south- ern hemisphere were copies of Marx’s Capital (1867) and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776).2 Two years later he founded the Boomerang, a newspaper that advocated for the Workers’ Party and expressed deeply rac- ist arguments against Asian immigrants who were at that time settling in Jason Rudy, Aaron Bartlett, Lindsey O'Neil, and Justin Thompson - 9781526152893 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/26/2021 07:39:35PM via free access 140 World/Globe Queensland as agricultural labourers.3 According to the Brisbane Courier, 30,000 Chinese had emigrated to Queensland in the decade leading up to 1887, inspiring a manifesto by the Australian Anti-Chinese League that called for severe restrictions on Asian immigration.4 This was the context for Lane’s 1888 ‘Asian invasion’ novel, White or Yellow: The Coming Race War of 1908 AD, serialised in the Boomerang. By the early 1890s Lane had determined that Australia would never be the utopian white socialist colony he wanted it to be. This conclusion reflected both racial animus and class unease. Australia in the closing decades of the nineteenth century was in a state of economic crisis, resulting in what Thomas Keneally has labelled ‘a savage class battle’.5 Labour historian Humphrey McQueen writes that ‘[e]conomic fears and pure racism were’, throughout this period, ‘inextricable, with each feeding the flames of the other’s fire’.6 Most significant for Lane was the Australian Maritime Strike that erupted in 1890 from a local disagreement between dock workers and management, eventually turning into an international labour strike. According to Bruce Scates, the strike ‘was phenomenally large by nineteenth century standards; 50,000 Australian workers were involved and perhaps as many as 10,000 New Zealanders’, and though generally known as a maritime strike, it quickly ‘spread to include shearers, miners, labourers, counters, storemen and railwaymen’.7 In the pages of the Worker, a Brisbane newspaper Lane founded in 1890 with the subtitle ‘Journal of the Associated Workers of Queensland’, Lane attempted to articulate the demands of a labour movement that he envisioned as both international (or, at least, Anglophone) and particularly Australian.8 ‘[U]nionism must be made so broad’, he argued in November 1890, ‘that everybody can stand under it and none need be against it’.9 In trying to resist the natural capital- ist tendency towards lower wages and higher productivity, Lane identified capitalists and non-white immigrants to Australia as equal obstacles. As in the American West, where ‘public anxieties over major shifts in the American industrial landscape and class relations became displaced onto the racialised figure of the male Chinese labor migrant’, as Edlie Wong has shown, so too Chinese workers in Australia were targeted with especial vehemence.10 According to McQueen: ‘Once the Chinese [in Australia] were perceived as an economic threat the belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority quickly turned Chinese customs into conclusive proof of [Asian] infamy.’11 As the strike built momentum in the summer of 1890, the secretary of the Amalgamated Shearers’ Union asked his members to co-operate with the striking wharf labourers so as to ‘draw such a cordon of unionism around the Australian continent as will effectually prevent a bale of wool leaving unless shorn by union shearers’.12 No single union could withstand the power and the pressure of the capitalists, but perhaps together they could. Jason Rudy, Aaron Bartlett, Lindsey O'Neil, and Justin Thompson - 9781526152893 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/26/2021 07:39:35PM via free access Australia to Paraguay 141 The language of solidarity and mutual aid did not extend across racial lines, however. Lane’s editorials in the Worker advocated the exclusion of Chinese workers from membership of the unions. Other progressive policies in the Worker were similarly intertwined with Sinophobic resentment. A letter in June 1890 proposes opening a co-operative clothing store to save workers money, and then adds ‘this system would go a long way to banish Chinese out of the colony’.13 Presumably, these proposed co-ops would sell only to white members, compelling Chinese workers to pay higher prices elsewhere. An editorial in the very first issue of theWorker is aghast at the Chinese- friendly policies of labour unions in New South Wales, warning against letting unions ‘touch the leprous agony’: ‘No Chinese need apply where the [Queensland Shearer’s Union] is about, and the southerners ought to make the same regulation.’14 In the next issue, representatives of the New South Wales labour unions dispute this fact and, by June, the newspaper’s ‘Edito- rial Mill’ wants to settle ‘the unfortunate misunderstanding that existed pre- viously’ when the Worker alleged that the Shearers’ Union had Chinese members.15 While Lane continued to attack Chinese workers, all non-white workers qualified as a threat. ‘It is very evident,’ he laments in a July 1890 editorial, ‘that there is a determination on the part of a section of the employ- ing class to keep kanakas, Javanese, coolies, Chinese or some other sort of cheap and nasty labour in the country by hook or crook.’16 Later in the same issue, he threatens lynch-like violence: ‘If the Charters Towers cooks’ union doesn’t let the Chinamen understand that from the kitchen he must go, its members will cut off his pigtail and hang themselves with it in carrier-like rotation, heaviest first.’17 Brisbane’s position in northern Australia might help explain why the white Queensland unions were so vehement in their Sinophobia. More than Sydney or Melbourne, nineteenth-century Brisbane embodied Homi Bhabha’s sense of Australia as a place where ‘the nations of Europe and Asia meet’.18 Between 1863 and 1904, according to Penelope Edmonds and Amanda Nettelbeck, 62,000 Pacific Islanders were imported to work ‘in Queensland sugarcane plantations, the pastoral sector and colonial house- holds’.19 Queensland enacted the first limit on Chinese immigration in 1877, decades before the official ‘White Australia’ policy that would restrict Aus- tralian immigration through most of the twentieth century. Phil Griffiths notes that ‘politicians in Queensland railed against a “Chinese invasion”, fearing that their control over the minimally colonised north and over the process of colonisation was threatened’.20 Indigenous Australians were not as much of a concern for the Worker, but the editors nonetheless positioned them as impediments to land ownership. An editorial in the inaugural issue demands that the Australian government follow the example of some South American countries in settling areas of Jason Rudy, Aaron Bartlett, Lindsey O'Neil, and Justin Thompson - 9781526152893 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/26/2021 07:39:35PM via free access 142 World/Globe Indigenous land, asking: ‘Are we going to let Spanish-Americans do more to keep back Indians than Anglo-Australians do to keep back poverty?’21 The Worker thus positions poverty and Indigenous land claims as intertwined. Only by forcibly dispossessing Indigenous peoples, the editors argue, can poor Anglo-Australian workers find suitable work. These issues only intensified in urgency as the strikes crumbled in late 1890; by early 1891, dock workers and shearers returned to work without employers meeting their demands. Attempt- ing to turn a regional labour dispute into an international strike had been a huge risk for Australian workers and, as Scates describes, they lost nearly everything that Australian workers had gained through previous actions: ‘The Maritime Strike reversed a generation’s achievements: unions collapsed, fed- erations failed, strikes fell prey to the “terror” of victimization.’22 Lane saw in this not just the failure of the Australian labour movement but ‘the elimina- tion from the political parties of the enthusiasm of courage and sacrifice’.23 These economic and political frustrations form the context in which Lane committed to establishing a socialist, whites-only colony in the Paraguayan jungle, a moment in Australian colonial history in which working-class whites felt increasingly estranged from the southern continent’s future.
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